About this time Jean wrote a letter to David at Oxford. It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month there is nothing that seems worth telling. Jean wrote: " ... You have been away now for four days, and we still miss you badly. Nobody sits in your place at the table, and it gives us such a horrid bereaved feeling when we look at it. Mhor was waiting at the gate for the post yesterday and brought your letter in in triumph. He was particularly interested in hearing about your scout, and has added his name to the list he prays for. You will be glad to hear that he has got over his prejudice against going to heaven. It seems it was because someone told him that dogs couldn't go there, and he wouldn't desert Micawber--Peter, in other words. Jock has put it right by telling him that the translators of the Bible probably made a slip, and Mhor now prays earnestly every night: 'Let everyone in The Rigs go to heaven,' hoping thus to smuggle in his dear companion. "It is an extraordinary thing, but almost the very minute you left Priorsford things began to happen. "I told you in the note I wrote the day you left that Bella Bathgate's lodger had arrived and that I had seen her, but I didn't realise then what a difference her coming would make to us. I never knew such a friendly person; she comes in at any sort of time--after breakfast, a few minutes before luncheon, for tea, between nine and ten at night. Did I tell you her name is Pamela Reston, and her brother, who seems to be ranging about India somewhere, is Lord Bidborough ('A lord-no-less,' as Mrs. M'Cosh would say). She calls him Biddy, and seems devoted to him. "Although she is horribly rich and an 'honourable,' and all that sort of thing, she isn't in the least grand. She never impresses one with her opulence as, for instance, Mrs. Duff-Whalley does. Her clothes are beautiful, but so much a part of her personality that you never think of them. Her pearls don't hit you in the face as most other people's do. Because she is so unconscious of them, I suppose. I think she is lovely. Jock says she is like a greyhound, and I know what he means--it is the long, swift, graceful way she has of moving. She says she is forty. I always thought forty was quite old, but now it seems to me the very prettiest age. Age doesn't really matter at all to people who have got faces and figures and manners like Pamela Reston. They will always make whatever age they are seem the perfect age. "I do wonder what brings her to Priorsford! I rather think that having been all her life so very 'twopence coloured' she wants the 'penny plain' for a change. Perhaps that is why she likes The Rigs and us. There is no mistake about our 'penny-plainness'--it jumps to the eye!